Few poems announce their subject as quietly as "Cycle." The title gives away the shape before the first line has been read: something goes, and something comes back. Rolfe Humphries moves through a single turn of the seasons, from the tolling of autumn bells to the ringing of spring ones, and in doing so suggests that loss and renewal belong to the same movement. The "she" who vanishes in the second half of the poem and returns in the final stanza is never named, but she is clearly more than a woman. Called "Morning's daughter," she reads as the living spirit of the growing year itself, a figure close to the old myths of a vegetation goddess who descends into darkness and rises again.
What makes the poem work is its sound. The opening stanza is built from very short lines, each of only a few syllables, strongly stressed, that fall like the strokes of a bell: "Bells in autumn / Toll a rhythm / Slow and solemn." The repeated m and l sounds blur into one another the way a bell's note lingers after the strike. Notice that the stanza is also a chain of rhymes on soft, open endings (rhythm, solemn, welcome, kingdom, lonesome), many of them only half-rhymes. The effect is of a toll that never quite lands on a clean chord, which suits a poem about incompleteness and waiting.
The second stanza turns from sound to sight, and the shift is sharp. "Can a sound throw / Any shadow?" is a strange, almost impossible question, and the poem answers it by pairing bells with the image of snow filling a furrow. Snow, like the bell's note, erases and softens; the furrow, a line cut by the plough in hope of a crop, is quietly buried. Then comes the most startling image in the poem: "Whose white arrow / Fells the hero?" The arrow is white, as snow is white, so winter itself becomes the archer, and the "hero" struck down is whatever is strongest in the year. The question is never answered, and the poem is better for it, because the hero feels like every strong thing that cold or death can bring low.
By the third stanza the loss is complete: "No trace of her." Humphries leaves her absence unexplained, and the stanza gives us only a watcher, "pale" and positioned "by green water." The colours are interesting. The watcher is pale, drained like the season, but the water is green, still carrying the memory of growth. This figure "knows the answer," which quietly links back to the unanswered question about the arrow. We are not told what he knows, but the placement suggests it is the answer the whole poem is moving toward: that the white arrow does not have the last word.
That answer arrives in the final stanza, which is noticeably longer and looser than the rest, as if the poem itself were thawing. The bells, once solemn, now ring in spring, branches blossom, and she comes "Out of darkness, / All bright, to bless, / Heal and hallow." The verbs stack up generously, and the alliteration of "hallow" and "heal" gives the return a ceremonial feel, like a blessing spoken aloud. The phrase "as we know" is easy to pass over, but it matters. The poem presents renewal as something humans have always expected, a piece of shared knowledge as reliable as the calendar, rather than as a miracle.
Part of the poem's quiet power lies in what it refuses to do. It does not mourn at length, and it does not preach about hope. It simply lets the same instrument, the bell, change its meaning as the season changes: first a call to "the kingdom / Of the lonesome," then a herald of "new stir, / Growth and wonder." The poem's compact form, its restraint, and its willingness to leave a question hanging all work together to make an old idea feel fresh. Read it twice, and the bells begin to sound different the second time, which is exactly the point.